Talk:Q849919

Related concepts

The article Electromagnetism in en-wiki is about the electromagnetic interaction, one of four fundamental interactions, so this article have to be in Q849919 rather than in Q11406. The Q11406 is for the "branch of science concerned with the forces that occur between electrically charged particles". "Electromagnetic interaction" in en-wiki is redirected to Electromagnetism. --V1adis1av (talk) 20:55, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

okay, sorry about that. I was too fast. --Pasleim (talk) 20:59, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Should this item be merged with Q11406? It looks like they're just two names for the same thing, since in general Wikipedias have only one article covering both topics. A. Mahoney (talk) 13:53, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

They are not exactly the same. electromagnetic interaction (Q849919) is about the fundamental force and electromagnetism (Q11406) is about the branch of science. It's good to separate these two concepts. And there are a couple of languages which do have an article about both (e.g. cawiki, cywiki, eowiki etc.). --Pasleim (talk) 23:37, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Let's take into account also the classical electromagnetism (Q377930) (classical electromagnetism is a synonym of classical electrodynamics) and quantum electrodynamics (Q234881); both are also about the branches of science. It seems that we have 4 terms for 3 entities here, and classical electromagnetism (Q377930) should be merged with electromagnetism (Q11406). --V1adis1av (talk) 20:03, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with two of V1adis1av's assertions:

1. en:Electromagnetism is not just about the "interaction"; it is as much about the "branch of science" as any article listed under electromagnetism (Q11406) (AFAICT, since I can only get the gist of all the non-English articles) — i.e., at least half of the article is concerned with the historical development of the relevant ideas, and it contains links to textbooks and popular science books for further reading about the subject in general. Also, the redirect doesn't mean the two concepts are equivalent, merely that the material that would have been at the redirect title is incorporated into the target article.
2. classical electromagnetism (Q377930) should not be merged with electromagnetism (Q11406), since they are just as distinct as electromagnetism (Q11406) and electromagnetic interaction (Q849919) (in particular, classical electromagnetism/electrodynamics is a specific subset of electromagnetism, as is quantum electrodynamics).

I would recommend placing en:Electromagnetism under Q11406 and one of the redirects, en:Electromagnetic interaction or en:Electromagnetic force (I would say the latter), under Q849919. And no merge of Q377930 and Q11406. - dcljr (talk) 01:54, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

As further context for my previous comment, note that (as I type this) there are 79 Wikipedia languages listed under electromagnetism (Q11406) (hereafter referred to as the scientific "field") and 46 under electromagnetic interaction (Q849919) (the physical "force"). A whopping 29 Wikipedias (ca, cy, eo, es, et, fi, gl, hr, id, is, ja, ko, la, lv, mn, nl, pl, pt, sh, sk, sl, sr, ta, tr, uk, vi, war, zh_yue, zh) have articles for both concepts. Among these pairs of articles, generally speaking, the ones for the "field" tend to be longer and include more history (e.g., mentions of multiple scientists, like Ørsted and Maxwell), while the ones for the "force" are shorter and tend to include more mathematics (matrices, integrals). These similarities across languages seem to be due largely to translation of articles between languages, BTW. Two languages (be, bg) have an article in one list that is the target of a redirect in the other (they go opposite ways: be redirects from the "force" to the "field" and bg the other way 'round — although the bg article seems [to me] to have more in common with the other "field" articles).

Of the remaining 15 "force" articles (i.e., no corresponding "field" article or redirect), only 1 (lt) seems to have significant mathematical content of the kind typical of other "force" articles (as seen in wikis with articles on both concepts, anyway); 4 (als, de, en, sw) seem to have only significant historical content (no math); and 2 (it, ru) seem to have both; the rest (ar, be_x_old, jv, kk, pa, te, yi, zh_min_nan) were too short and/or in too unfamiliar a language for me to be able to tell anything about their particular "perspective", given the amount of time I was willing to spend on this investigation.

I didn't classify the remaining 48 "field" articles (no corresponding "force" article or redirect) in a similar manner because there were just too many to deal with, but I did glance at all of them, and I can say that a few struck me as mainly based on a direct translation of the English article, and several take a much more mathematical tack than en does.

Now, clearly I'm using very loose criteria here for what characterizes a "field" vs. "force" article, because I've had to use things I could identify across many languages I don't read. But based on my cursory glances through all these articles, I have to say that the current assignment of articles to Wikidata items seems almost completely arbitrary if one takes the view that the actual content of the article should determine its classification. Isn't it actually a more maintainable approach to ask oneself, "if I read this page title, what would I expect the article to be talking about"? I mean, I suppose this would require native or near-native speakers to resolve completely, but ISTM that the very order of the Wikidata item creation indicates that electromagnetism (Q11406) can be treated as a more general concept that contains the more specific electromagnetic interaction (Q849919) as a "special case" article topic, if a wiki cares to create it. Therefore, all the article titles that are literally a translation/transliteration of the word "Electromagnetism" should probably be listed under the more general Q11406 (currently there are at least 5 such articles, including the English one, under the more specific Q849919), and only the article titles that mention "force" or "interaction" (or some equivalent) should go in the more specific Q849919.

Other opinions? - dcljr (talk) 03:55, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

English name

I have taken the liberty of renaming this item (in English) "electromagnetic force" (from "electromagnetic interaction"), since that is the more common English term for this phenomenon. However, after consulting the relevant English Wikipedia articles, I have decided to leave the names of weak interaction (Q11418) and strong interaction (Q11415) unchanged. - dcljr (talk) 22:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)